Got to thinking about comment spam the other day. I assume that comment spam is like the regular old variety , in that it has a fantastically low success rate, but that it is so cheap that it is still cost-effective, but really–some of the things these people seem to be selling just seem like they wouldn’t work at all, just sitting there in the comments of someone’s blog. But the market has spoken, I suppose. The sorts of greedy sociopaths who trade in spam, comment-based or otherwise, wouldn’t be doing it if they didn’t make money at it.

It is annoying, though. On a number of occasions, I’ve gone to someone’s blog, an author I’d just discovered for example, and tried to post a cheery comment, only to find that the comments had been closed on the appropriate post. The comments on this blog had started out as open forever, but I eventually had to set them to close after a few weeks thanks to the blizzard of spam. Of course, the more posts one makes, the more spam one gets if they don’t close off after a while. I had one post, in particular, that was attracting spam like flies to a bloated corpse. Hmm, that may not be the best metaphor. Lets go with flies to honey. Except let’s face it, given the choice, flies will go right past the honey to the bloated corpse every time. So maybe the spammers are more like fruit flies.

So there you go. Spammers are like fruit flies, only not quite as well-versed in grammar, and my clever ideas are like delicious gourmet preserves spread on the toast of WordPress. Glad I cleared that up.